A weblog, mostly of book reviews, by Jim Henry

21 May 2005

The
Book of Night With Moon by Diane
Duane is set in the same world as her series beginning with So
You Want to Be a Wizard, but, though characters from that
series appear, most of them play only minor roles; this novel stands
alone pretty well. The story revolves around a group of wizard-cats
who maintain the teleportation gates in Grand Central Station;
something is going wrong with several of the gates, and they are
requiring adjustment more often than they ought. Then they discover
evidence that one of the gates has been used and its access log
deliberately erased; and, about the same time, they find a badly
wounded kitten, who turns out to be a potential wizard. Enough about
the plot; the world is pretty interesting, and I can talk about it
without spoilers.

In this world, there are wizards of every sentient race; a few human
wizards and one dog wizard also play major or minor roles, but the
cats are on center stage here. (Wizards of several species of whale
appear in Deep
Wizardry, the second and maybe the best of the Young
Wizards series.) These wizards are recruited by the Powers —
angels or demigods — to stymie the Lone Power, the Power that
invented entropy and death. (It's not terribly hard to figure out who
the Lone Power is supposed to be, when we read how the wizards
traditionally greet him/her when they meet: "Eldest, Fairest and
Fallen... greeting and defiance.") At least two of the novels set
in this world involve wizards on mission helping a young sentient
species make their Choice, which they are presented with when the Lone
Power discovers them and makes them an offer that's hard to refuse
(much as in Perelandra).

Duane is a good storyteller and a pretty good writer; these books are
often hard to put down. They aren't as good as Lewis and Tolkien's
best work, but they're far better than some of the wretched stuff that
passes as Christian fantasy these days; and, I reckon, probably more
likely to be enjoyed by evangelicals than the works of Gene Wolfe or Tim Powers. Diane
Duane is not quite as subtle as Lewis, or anywhere near as subtle as
Tolkien, Powers, or Wolfe; but, still the background and message
(mostly) don't get in the way of the stories. Overall, I can
recommend this and the first five of the seven Young Wizards books (I
haven't read the most recent two). There's also a second cat wizards
book, To
Visit the Queen, which I haven't read yet.

Time travel has been discovered (supposedly in the early 24th century)
by a wealthy, secretive corporation, Dr. Zeus Incorporated. Naturally
they want to make money on it. It seems impossible to change recorded
history, but with a little experimenting they find they are pretty
free to act in place-times about which nothing is known. So they plan
to make their next several trillions by rescuing lost art objects,
manuscripts, the DNA of extinct species, and so forth, just before
they are lost, and selling them in their own 24th century. But time
travel is extremely expensive; to save the expense of going back and
forth so much, they find a use for their immortality technology
(which, as it only works on children, and has unpleasant side effects,
hasn't been used much): they recruit small children in the ancient
past, who would have died if not rescued by Company operatives, work
the immortality process on them, and put them to work. These immortal
cyborgs live through history in real time, rescuing and hiding for
later retrieval various valued things that would otherwise be lost,
and periodically rescuing children to be recruited into the Company.

The series begins in In the Garden of Iden when a
four-year old girl, Mendoza, is rescued from the Spanish Inquisition
by a 20,000-year old cyborg named Joseph. After being turned into a
cyborg and trained, she's sent (along with Joseph and several other
Company operatives) to England at the beginning of Queen Mary's reign.
This is where (in spite of a favorable impression going in due to
having read several of her short stories in Asimov's)
Baker almost lost me: the virulent anti-Catholicism and ahistorical
portrayal of England in Mary's reign made In the Garden of
Iden hard to finish. Baker gets most of the details right, as
far as I can tell, but the way she portrays the relations between
Catholics and Protestants in England at the time seems almost totally
wrong, based on all the history I've read; she seems to accept the
official portrait of "Bloody Mary" uncritically. Besides
this, there are some minor infelicities of the kind one expects and
allows for in a first novel, and some major strengths: the
characterization, the portrayal of the secret cyborg subculture, and
above all the humor; this is a very funny book, as is the second
volume, Sky Coyote. There are funny parts in the later
books as well, though I wouln't describe any of them primarily as
comedies.

The anti-Catholic strain doesn't appear again in the later books.
Sky Coyote is hard to take seriously, but is primarily a
comic interlude between the tragic ending of In the Garden of
Iden and the high adventure of the later books. Joseph and
Mendoza are reunited on another mission in 1699, as
part of a team that's to make a documentary about an Indian tribe on
the coast of California that's soon to be wiped out by smallpox. If
possible, they're also to try to persuade them to migrate to a secret
Company base to avoid the smallpox. To this end, the various cyborgs
on the mission disguise themselves as various gods — Joseph as
Coyote, for instance. Baker has great fun transposing stereotypical
Californian characteristics onto this lost tribe of Indians; it's
hysterically funny, but suspension of disbelief fails.

I won't say anything specific about the plots of the latter three
books. I would recommend that if you like the first two at all, you
should read the short stories and the later novels, as they get
better. The short stories might be the best place to start, though
maybe some of them have minor spoilers for In the Garden of
Iden; I can't recall for sure. You should definitely read the
stories in Black Projects, White Knights and, if you can
find it, "Son, Observe the Time", before reading the latest
two novels, The Graveyard Game and The Life of the
World to Come. I'm not sure why "Son, Observe the
Time" wasn't included in the collection; it's more important to
the story arc than some of the others that were included, and it was a
Hugo nominee. It appeared in Asimov's, May 1999, and in
The
Year's Best Science Fiction, Seventeenth Annual Collection
(2000) edited by Gardner Dozois.

According to Kage Baker's own home
page, there are to be at least two more Company novels: The
Children of the Company is scheduled for later this year,
according to Amazon.com, and she's currently working on a seventh
novel tentatively titled The Machine's Child. Another
collection of Company stories (surely including "Son, Observe the
Time"?) is supposed to be coming as well. FYI, in case you
prefer to wait until a series is finished before you start it.
(That's usually my preference as well, but here I got sucked in by the
short stories and found it hard to stop, once I got past the annoying
parts of the first novel.)

A
Warning to the Curious and other stories is a collection of
ghost stories by M.R. James
(1863-1936). Many of them are framed as discoveries of old
manuscripts; in most of them, the culmination of the supernatural
events must be inferred by the reader, as no one survives to tell the
narrator what happened directly. The settings (mostly in small
villages in rural England) are evocatively described. Most of them
are very effectively creepy, with amusing bits early on that fade as
the horrifying supernatural events progress. A couple of them (e.g.,
"Number 13") have a comic tone throughout, which makes them
enjoyable in quite another way. This mix of stories makes for a
better collection than would a set of purely horrific stories. Based
on what I've read of his work so far, I would rank M.R. James above
H.P. Lovecraft and just below Clark Ashton
Smith as a writer of supernatural horror. I definitely plan to
acquire and read more of his collections.

14 May 2005

Lawrence Watt-Evans is serializing The
Spriggan Mirror, a new Ethshar novel, on his website. It's
something of a sequel to With
A Single Spell, but appears (from the four
chapters posted so far) to mostly involve different characters, so
you shouldn't hesitate to jump in even if you haven't read that book
or any of the other Ethshar books (which stand alone pretty well).
Mr. Evans is accepting donations by check or PayPal, and posting
another chapter once a week or whenever $100 in donations accumulates.

Gresh is the only son of parents with thirteen children. Several of
his sisters have taken up various branches of magic; Gresh himself has
made a reputation for finding obscure things needed as spell
ingredients, and has a successful business finding and selling them.
In the opening chapters, he is approached by a witch (Karanissa from
With A Single Spell) who wants his help finding an
enchanted mirror, which she says is the source of spriggans:

Spriggans had started appearing a few years ago, without explanation;
they had just been there, getting underfoot, poking into everything,
babbling nonsense.

In the next couple of chapters Gresh begins investigating where this
mirror might be, by capturing and interrogating a spriggan (promising
to set it free after it answers twenty questions in payment for
spilling an expensive vial of dragon blood). The family dynamics
among Gresh and his sisters are interesting, and Gresh's interrogation
of the spriggan is quite clever. It's too early to say much about The
Spriggan Mirror,
but, given the enjoyable quality of the earlier Ethshar novels and how
this one reads so far, I had no hesitation about pitching in some
money toward the next installment

Update 2005/10: LWE finished The
Spriggan Mirror recently, and the first draft remains
on his website. A second draft, slightly expanded, is supposed
to appear in trade paperback awhile hence from FoxAcre Press.

Overall I would say it's one of the better Ethshar novels, though not
the best. The mirror puzzle and its solution are intriguing and
satisfying, and the relations among the main characters get more
interesting over the course of the story. The novel does stand alone
tolerably well in the sense that you shouldn't be confused if this is
the first Ethshar novel you've read, though the characters from
With A Single Spell have a far more major role than I
expected they would after reading just the first few chapters, and it
contains serious spoilers for that earlier novel (as well as The
Spell of the Black Dagger).

It's been over a year since I last posted here; I don't guarantee
I'm going to start posting reviews regularly again, but I'll start
with a few brief comments on some of the books
I've read in the last few months,
and see how much time I have for longer reviews in the next month or
two.

Night
Watch by Terry Pratchett is one of the
best of the Discworld novels so far, which is saying a lot. But it
doesn't stand alone as well as some of the others; it's another in the
subseries begun with Guards!
Guards!. Samuel Vimes and the City Watch are tracking down
a psychopathic killer, when a magical accident during a chase across
the roofs of Unseen University sends Vimes and his quarry back in
time. It soon becomes obvious that they have started to change
history for the worse, and Vimes resolves to do whatever he can to put
things back on course — until an opportunity arises to, perhaps, make
things turn out better this time... for everyone but himself.

The
Old Curiosity Shop by Charles
Dickens is perhaps the weakest of his novels that I've read so
far, but still very good. Parts of it are famously annoying (large
chunks of the the main plot thread about Little Nell and her
grandfather), but the other plot threads, about Daniel Quilp, the
sadistic dwarf usurer, Dick Swiveller the young law clerk, and Kit
Nubbles, Nell's friend, more than make up for that.

Steven Brust's The Viscount of
Adrilankha, a novel in three volumes (The
Paths of the Dead, The
Lord of Castle Black, and Sethra
Lavode) is primarily a sequel to The Phoenix
Guards and Five Hundred
Years After, but it also ties in to the Vlad Taltos books and Brokedown
Palace, set in the same world in different periods. It's one
of his better novels, but not a good place to start reading his work,
since it seems to presuppose some knowledge of Dragaeran history;
Jhereg or The Phoenix Guards would be better
novels to start reading the Dragaera books with, and a stand-alone novel like
To Reign in Hell or The Sun, the Moon and the Stars
might be the best place to start reading Brust.